Rising costs fuel price request.(gas suppliers request rate hike)

Crain's Detroit Business, October, 2005 by Lane, Amy

Byline: Amy Lane Individual utility customers won't be the only ones to feel a financial pinch from high natural-gas prices. Companies that supply the fuel say that unless state regulators grant their requests to increase rates, they face hundreds of millions of dollars in gas costs they can't recover from customers, posing cash-flow and other financial problems.

"To the extent that we're not able to recover that ... that simply becomes a larger and larger debt, typically short term, that we have to bear,'' said Stephen Ewing, president of DTE Energy Gas, the division of DTE Energy Co. housing natural-gas supplier Michigan Consolidated Gas Co. "It reduces our liquidity. It draws down our short-term lines of credit, it reduces our financial flexibility...

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